


Centenary

by The_Exile



Category: Tokyo Jungle
Genre: Apocalypse, Cannibalism, Community: 40fandoms, Doom, Gen, Pollution - Freeform, Spoilers, based on a let's play, law of the jungle, lots of animals die, post-100 years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 23:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10450278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: On the hundredth year of the Bear dynasty, things went from bad to worse.





	

The hundredth year of the Great Bear Dynasty should have been a time for celebration but the relentless march of time just felt like a death sentence. As he stared at himself in a pool of water, searching for grey hairs and wondering if it was time to produce an eighteenth generation, the seventeenth heir to the title of Alpha Male Great Bear couldn't help but feel a shudder down his powerful spine. 

It didn't help that the water was toxic. You could not only smell its taint, acrid and burning on the tongue even before you put your snout anywhere near it, it was now visible. Black murk covered the water in an oily film. His mother had taught him, as his mother's mother had taught her, that the foul black water meant sickness and death that would spread to his brothers and sisters. It was everywhere now, though, and he still needed water to live, no matter how dirty. He would have to dip into the family's store of medicine, produced by humans long ago but now owned by the strongest animal in the urban jungle who could wrest it from the grasp of the others. 

Without doubt, the title of 'King of the Jungle' belonged to the bears. Strong, vicious, untiring, surprisingly fast and cunning when they needed to be, they had seen the rise and fall of countless other would-be regimes. First it was the Pomeranians, with their endless numbers and terrifying, unearthly yips. Then the Tosa and their ancient ancestral knowledge of Tokyo's terrain and the ways of its spirits. The lions and hyenas had fought endless wars, wiping each other out. Even the housecats had enjoyed a long reign, their ruthlessly efficient hunter's nature coming to the fore. Now it was between the bears and the reborn great lizards, and the lizards were losing.

Not that it would matter once the last pool of water was spoiled, the air completely clouded over with black fog, the plants died out and the stockpiles of medicine and dried food ran out. Soon there would be nothing to hunt, either, once the weaker animals died out. They had been forced to ration their food, to hunt less and rest more in preparation for an inevitable famine. It wasn't the way of a bear. Hibernation was for winter and Tokyo hadn't had things like normal seasons and weather for a long time, only a spreading cloud of poison and death.

A flash of muddy green scales and sharp sickle-like claws flitted in the periphery of his vision. He pounced without needing to think, his teeth fastened around the dinosaur's throat before it could react. The kill was instantaneous. Fellow carnivores weren't tasty but at least it was fresh, clean food. As he wiped the blood from his maw, he looked around for the rest. There was never only one of those things.

Or there shouldn't be. As he sniffed the air, he realised that he was alone, except for the corpses of every other dinosaur in the region, torn limb from limb by something that smelled of such murderous savagery that it went beyond the simple thrill of the hunt. He smelled insanity, like the time his brother caught rabies and attacked him, except that there were far too many of these things at once, moving too fast and with too much purpose. 

He hid behind the carcass of a rusty, beat-up old van, praying that they didn't pick up his scent. One disadvantage of being such a big bear was that there was virtually nowhere to hide on the few occasions that something was stronger than you. The things poured over the rubble of the collapsed buildings. At first he thought they were some sort of ape. Then he saw that they held themselves too straight, walking fully on two legs and only stooping their backs a little, their arms not even slightly scraping along the floor. Their dark, matted hair only covered patches of their skin. Some of them had grabbed random objects, sharp rocks, sticks and jagged pieces of broken metal, and were waving them around in a way that unmistakenly signalled a desire to kill something with them. 

They were only small - a little numerous, maybe, but there were still enough bears to deal with those numbers if they all worked together properly. He didn't understand why his heart was pounding from such primal terror that he was worried it would burst. 

He ran to warn the rest of his family. Please don't let them have seen me, he thought to himself. For some reason - maybe some distant memory, shared down the generations, from the time before the fall - he knew that, if these creatures even knew that one bear existed, they would relentlessly hunt down every single one to extinction. It wouldn't even be for food. If all those dinosaur corpses were fresh, those humans were killing their prey at a rate far beyond anything they could eat, and the taint had gotten so bad these days that food rotted away before you could even think about leaving it for later. 

What were they eating? How had they bred so fast, gotten so strong and fast and vicious, in such a short period of time when things were so bad for everyone? Why did they smell insane?

As if in answer, he suddenly heard a ferocious simian growl. He froze and his head whipped around in time to see two of the creatures bump into each other, starting a fight between them. One of them immediately sprang at the other and stabbed him with a sharp metal pipe until the other stopped moving. Then, without pausing for breath, he tore into the corpse and started devouring it.

The one thing that nobody in the urban jungle would do. The one unwritten rule, to stop what was already a mad, unnatural situation from growing even worse. 

He began to run faster but he already knew that the brief stop had lost him too much time. The things - humans, he finally understood, but reborn even worse than before - had already spotted him.

They could not be stopped.


End file.
